As you have heard or seen by now, the FAA's NOTAM system has crashed. This is an ongoing stream of last-minute flight warnings, everything from tall towers with lights out of unscheduled runway closures -- all the stuff essential to safe flying that wasn't known in advance.
At this point, there is no evidence of any kind of cyberwarfare. My own experience with submitting NOTAM information has always involved calling up FAA or a subcontractor and getting a real human being on the other end of the phone. The computerized part is the collection and dissemination of information, so it's pretty hard to break the system from the outside. It's not impossible, but the most likely cause is the FAA's perpetual battle with balky, out-of-date equipment. They have all the speed and flexibility of the Federal government going for them and the usual budget battles, plus the teensy little problem of operating a vast network of equipment critical to life and safety. They can't just whack together a pile of Raspberry Pis to add to, repair or change their systems. So it's a constant effort to keep everything running, more-or-less up to date and online all the time. The horror-averted storied FAA technical types tell would curdle your hair.
They didn't get this one averted in time to let flights remain on schedule. They don't have the option of converting the commercial skies into a giant four-way stop* and hoping everyone pays close attention, so it's time to stop the music and let planes sit on the ramps until the problem has been sorted out. We've had worse and gotten through it -- the previous air-traffic radar system (or was it the one before that?) got very crashy in its final years, especially the functions that automatically tracked which flight was which. Controllers had to keep various manual backups ready and things could get sporty indeed when it acted up at a busy airport. FAA will sort out the present problem sometime today and the unusual inconveniences of commercial air travel will return to normal inconveniences.
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* This sounds very funny, but it is exactly how the smallest private airports work -- there's no "tower." There are rules for who gets the right of way and you have to pay attention to who else is in the the air or about to be when you are taking off or landing.
I have no idea how the modern NOTAM system works, not having flown for nearly half of my life, now. Locally, in the "olden" days, we watched for NOTAMs on Oil Burner routes. Thanks for the memories.
ReplyDeleteToday was the first I've heard the NOTAM acronym now stands for Notice To Air Missions instead of Notice to Airmen. 'Bout time, I suppose, since women have piloted airplanes for over a century.
ReplyDeleteOne cyber expert noted that while a cyberattack is possible, most big failures are caused by bad software updates. Our city lost its Metro Ethernet circuits because of a failed switch firmware update at the telco CO...the outage lasted most of a business day and hosed a LOT of business traffic.
There's a way to file NOTAM's via the WWW, but I'm old-fashioned and call in tower light outages on the phone. Gives me a chance to practice my NATO phonetic alphabet.